Unsung at Home, Adored Abroad: What Other Chinese Products Are Worth Buying, Buying, Buying?

No Pechoin here, and no cooling balm either. #The Good Stuff#

In China, McDonald's biggest rival is KFC. In the United States, it's Burger King.

Uniqlo's sales in China account for more than half of its global total, yet in the US market Uniqlo keeps closing stores one after another.

Feiyue and Warrior sneakers belong to China's 1980s and '90s, but they have improbably swept the fashion world in Europe and America, turning into hot tickets — into fashion itself.

So besides Feiyue, the qipao and Communist slogan posters, what else does China make that foreigners actually chase?

"Made in China" was once a byword for cheap and shoddy. If you still think that, you are behind the times. A little political economy makes the point: a system that has passed through its crude, low-end stage of production is bound to enter an era of finer division of labor. Under the global economy, Chinese brands have become the indispensable, good-value household goods of tens of millions of homes — and some of them have also broken through and won recognition in other fields.

The Apple of Drones

Take DJI, the only Chinese aerial-drone brand sold in Apple Stores.

In consumer drones, DJI has earned the title "the Apple of drones." Michael Blades, an analyst at the research firm Frost & Sullivan, has said DJI's success lies in creating the market for non-professional unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs); everyone else is chasing DJI.

That hints at its influence in Europe and America. Since 2013, different DJI product lines have been named one of the "world's most iconic robots" by Britain's The Economist, one of the "top ten tech products" by America's Time, and an "outstanding high-tech product of 2014" by The New York Times.

But DJI became a household name in China largely because of February 6, 2015, when the singer Wang Feng — nicknamed the "Headline King" for his talent for dominating entertainment news — staged a spectacular proposal to Zhang Ziyi. The drone carrying the 9.15-carat diamond ring was DJI's Phantom 2 Vision+, then priced at 7,999 yuan. At a time when iPhones averaging more than 6,000 yuan had already become ordinary consumer goods, that price was not hard for the public to accept.

Mainstream entertainment news, plus a price drifting steadily into consumer-goods territory, brought DJI's drones into everyday life, not just into view.

By DJI's own numbers, it now holds 70% of the global drone market.

Founded in 2006, this Shenzhen tech startup counts as a Chinese brand worth talking about.

However Great America's Tesla Is, It Still Can't Beat BYD

In electric cars, only two brands get compared and argued over on social media again and again — Tesla and BYD. It is also a contest between an American brand and a Chinese one.

The tech crowd has its share of true Tesla believers, and Zhihu is full of posts comparing the two companies on everything from the education levels of their staff to their core technology. But on the actual business numbers, BYD is running far ahead.

Global EV sales rankings for the first half of 2016 show BYD still leading by a wide margin, with 43,244 units sold over the six months, up 14% year on year, beating Nissan again. In four of those months — January, April, May and June — BYD was the world's best-selling brand. On that ranking, Tesla came only third.

BYD's sales success is of course bound up with government subsidies for new-energy vehicles, including free Shanghai license plates and heavy spending on supporting infrastructure. But there is no denying that BYD's own DNA as a battery maker has also helped it expand at scale.

By now BYD has moved into foreign markets as well.

In 2015, Uber in the United States began working with BYD in what looked like little more than a car-sales deal: American Uber drivers could pick up BYD's e6 electric car through Green Wheels USA, a Chicago-based builder and dealer of EV charging stations.

BYD's reach in the EV industry is not limited to passenger cars. In Europe and America it is better known for its electric buses. From 2013 on, BYD built factories abroad one after another and won contracts to supply electric buses to the transit authorities of Los Angeles and nearby Long Beach. The electric-bus market will be carved up soon, and BYD got there first: in 2016 it went on to take bus-service contracts in Italy and France.

A 1,000-Yuan 360-Degree Camera

2016 counts as the first year of live-streaming, the year the format went mainstream and white-hot. Video spread along with it — WeChat Moments' latest redesign shows how easily anyone can now reach for video. The Insta360 panoramic camera is, in a sense, a "spinoff" of live-streaming.

Until then, panoramic cameras sat at two extremes. Some cost a hundred thousand US dollars or more; these were professional, and their quality was guaranteed, but the footage needed professional post-production, given the file sizes involved. The consumer-grade ones varied wildly in quality and were good only for casual viewing, nowhere near ordinary commercial use or content production.

Insta360 sits in the middle of that market.

Its technical difficulty is concentrated in stitching quality and synchronized transmission. But judging by crowd-test results for its current products, in-camera stitching from multiple lenses, real-time transmission and processing on a phone are enough for ordinary commercial work, and they raise the bar for consumer products. One model especially:

The earlier Insta360 4K mostly turned up at wedding shoots and media live-streams. This one, the Insta360 Nano, costs less than 1,000 yuan and is the world's first panoramic camera made for the iPhone to win Apple's MFi certification; Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak called it "an amazing product." Since even a small fisheye lens attachment for the iPhone routinely runs past 1,000 yuan, the Nano is very good value.

From assembling a team in 2014, to funding from Qiming Venture Partners in 2015, to an official recommendation from Facebook and a CES 2017 Innovation Award in 2016, the Insta360 team has been reacting to the market fast. A new product called the Insta360 Air is said to be coming soon. Worth waiting for.

A DVD Player Blu-ray Obsessives Swear By

Another Chinese brand in high tech that has to be mentioned is OPPO.

We mean OPPO Digital (OPPO's audio-visual arm). For Blu-ray player enthusiasts, there is almost no alternative to OPPO. That may be hard to grasp in China, where people are used to homegrown streaming services — and where OPPO Electronics, which sounds like the same company, mostly competes in the low-to-mid-range market.

But first, look at these reviews.

"If you are an audio or video enthusiast looking for reference-class performance, then the OPPO BDP-103, which received our highest rating, is your only choice." So wrote a senior editor at America's Consumer Reports in its 2013 annual Blu-ray player review.

America's authoritative IT magazine PCMag argued: Apple does not make Blu-ray players, but even if it did, we believe OPPO would still beat Apple on user satisfaction. OPPO's 95% NPS (Net Promoter Score) is the highest PCMag has ever recorded for any manufacturer, in any product category, in any survey.

The most notable thing, though, is that on August 15, 2013, the OPPO BDP-103 won the weighty EISA Award from the European Imaging and Sound Association. First given in 1982, it is one of the industry's most trusted honors for consumer-electronics makers in Europe. It goes out once a year to new products that combine cutting-edge technology, full functionality and ergonomic design. In judging what a product does, EISA leans toward what the public embraces as high-quality, innovative work.

OPPO's Blu-ray players caught on in Europe and America partly because the audio-visual market there is so different. OPPO Digital set up shop in Silicon Valley from the start, and its read on its intended audience was exact.

In China, after all, where copyright enforcement for video and music is looser, most people are still used to downloading — and can even download Blu-ray-quality files free.

The Chinese Phone Recommended by The New York Times

Talking about OPPO's Blu-ray players makes it hard to avoid Liu Zuohu. As general manager of OPPO's Blu-ray division at the time, Liu led his team deep into the European and American markets; with no offline sales, he talked to users on forums and used what they said to improve the product.

Today Liu Zuohu is better known for something else: founder of OnePlus.

When the phone appeared in 2014, it drew enormous attention at once. A large part of that was its partnership with CyanogenMod (usually shortened to CM), a custom Android system — something Android enthusiasts still bring up today.

OnePlus's name recognition inside China, though, is thin, and its users cluster among geeks who can't resist flashing a new ROM. That bears out how outside opinion of OnePlus phones shifted, from "the best Android phone under $300" to "the Android phone best suited to geeks."

Abroad, OnePlus's reputation and sales are startling.

Within a year of launching its first smartphone in April 2014, OnePlus sold more than 1.5 million first-generation units, 60% of them overseas, especially in Europe, America and India. Every launch since has brought crowds of foreigners queuing to grab one — in recent years, only Apple gets that treatment.

That follows from Liu Zuohu's long experience in foreign markets, and it also neatly sidesteps a head-on fight in China's Android market.

On hardware and software, OnePlus phones hold up to repeated unboxing reviews. After the newest model, the OnePlus 3T, launched in late November, America's major business and tech outlets rated it very highly.

"The OnePlus 3T is one of the few Android phones stylish and elegant enough to make us consider giving up our iOS devices." That was the verdict of America's Wired. Founded in 1993, Wired covers how science and technology apply to every part of modern and future life, and it carries considerable influence over culture, the economy and politics.

PCMag, the well-known IT magazine mentioned above, famous for its product and technology reviews, wrote in its own review: with a full-power Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 and 6GB of RAM, the OnePlus 3T is one of the fastest phones we have tested.

The Verge, the well-known American tech outlet, called the OnePlus 3T plainly an upgrade that puts icing on an already good cake, and gave it 8.8 — the highest score any Chinese smartphone brand has received. Before that, the OnePlus 3 had earned a favorable 8.6.

Engadget, which Chinese readers commonly call "Addiction Tech," is one of the world's most popular blogs for gadgets and consumer electronics. Unlike other digital sites, Engadget carries plenty of odd, novel gadgets alongside reviews written by its editors. "Addiction Tech" likewise scored the OnePlus 3T as high as 89 out of 100.

Reviews like these are too many to count. Beyond specialist tech media, globally influential general-interest publications such as Forbes, The Guardian and Mashable have written about it at length in their business sections.

Not long ago The Verge, CNET and T3 — three of the most authoritative foreign tech outlets — published their customary "best smartphones of the year" lists.

Alongside the two giants, Apple and Google, the OnePlus 3T made the lists too. According to The Verge's English page (click here), the OnePlus 3T tied with the Samsung Galaxy S7 for third, both at 8.8 — but it sells for more than $200 less than the Samsung through every channel. It has earned its reputation as the value king among Android phones.

OnePlus phones cost far more abroad than they do in China. Demand overseas often outstrips supply, and the price you can actually pay on Amazon in the United States has climbed to $500 or $600 — far above the official Chinese price of 2,699 yuan, the figure currently listed on JD.com's official page (click here).

When the OnePlus 3 launched, we reported this: within an hour of the launch event, coverage arrived from more than 20 foreign tech outlets, and it was overwhelmingly positive. However good OnePlus's PR team may be, it could hardly keep foreign media on message for long, let alone pry open the mouths of authoritative outlets.

So how did the OnePlus 3T, an upgrade of the OnePlus 3, keep earning ever higher praise? Marques Brownlee, a YouTuber with 4 million followers, argued that for only $40 more, the 3T delivers outsized gains in design, battery capacity (up 30%), display and both cameras — and, of course, the biggest upgrade is the Snapdragon 821, since a phone that runs smoothly is one of the core things buyers care about. Fuller, more precise reviews are everywhere in Chinese- and English-language media and blogs; a quick search will turn them up.

The OnePlus 3T is on sale now on JD.com. If this rave-reviewed mid-range value king interests you, click here: https://item.jd.com/4110748.html

New year, new gift. Why not surprise yourself?